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José Jiménez, a street-smart Puerto Rican who in the late 1960s transformed a Chicago gang called the Young Lords into a powerful voice for the expansion of social services, fair housing and education. for his people, died on January 10. He is 76 years old.
His sister Daisy Rodriguez announced his death on Facebook. He did not say where he died or give a specific cause, although Mr. Jiménez lived in Chicago and was said to have been suffering from health problems.
Although the reformed Young Men lasted less than five years, the group had a huge impact on the national civil rights conversation and the urban community in the late 1960s and early 1960s. In the 70’s, Puerto Rican and other Latino views were strengthened.
Mr. Jiménez, known as Cha Cha, modeled his group on the Black Panthers, a radical black organization that used confrontational tactics to raise awareness of issues such as police brutality and lack of adequate health care in the country’s cities. At the same time, the Panthers opened clinics, schools and medical centers to provide the services they saw as lacking in the government.
The Young Lords began in 1959 as a gang on Chicago’s Near North Side, a group of recent Latino immigrants. In 1968, Mr. Jiménez changed the name of the Young Lords Organization and appointed the Minister of Defense and Education, who followed the Panther tradition, such as the berets he ordered his members to wear, although the ones were purple. Young Lords, opposite of the black Panthers.
The Young Lords never released numbers, but they said they had 1,000 members at their height, around 1970. Under Mr. Jiménez’s leadership, they spawned chapters across the country, especially in New York City and the Bay Area. Area of California.
The group made headlines in May 1969 when it occupied the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood for a week, demanding $601,000 in community support. They left after accepting the seminary. A few months later, they took over the local church, which ran a clinic and a free clinic.
“The survival program is not reformist, but a system created to provide services while building a new world,” Mr. Jiménez told the website Fight Back News in 2019. “We are not looking for profit, we are revolutionary. “
José Jiménez was born on August 8, 1948, in Caguas, PR. His father, Antonio, had already moved to Massachusetts for work, sending money to his mother, Eugenia Rodriguez. When José was 1, the family joined his father outside of Boston, where Mr. Jiménez picked vegetables for a soup company. A few years later they moved to Chicago.
The population of the Near North Side in 1940 was only 300; in 1960, it had 32,000, attracted by its affordable if dilapidated housing. The neighborhood was also targeted by the government’s urban renewal program, which promised new and better homes for residents, but they were often displaced to make way for housing. moderate.
The Jiménez family moved nine times when José was young, and he attended four elementary schools; he left school early. He joined about ten other boys and young men to form the Young Lords in 1959; in 1964, he ran it.
The gang was self-defense, but also petty crime, and Mr. Jiménez was jailed several times for theft and fighting with other gangs. At one point, in 1968, he came across a book written by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, and learned about the life of Malcolm X; in both of them he found a lesson about the betrayal of his life.
He began volunteering as an interpreter in prison, and after his release, he spread the idea of turning gangs into something good for the community. Many of his fellow travelers were hesitant, but some joined him, like a wave of newcomers, inspired by ideas of self-defense and self-improvement.
Like the Black Panthers, the group announced itself with marches, fliers and bold public statements. In 1969, the Young Lords joined with the Panthers and a far-left organization of white Southern immigrants, the Young Patriots, to form the Rainbow Coalition, a multi-racial advocacy organization (unaffiliated of the group of the same name founded by Rev. Jesse Jackson).
The Young Lords attracted the attention of the Chicago police and the FBI, who targeted the group through the secret Counterintelligence Program, known as Cointelpro, in an effort to monitor, infiltrate and disrupt left-wing organizations.
Mr. Jiménez was arrested 18 times during his years in charge of the Youth League. In 1970, he was accused of stealing wood from a store; he jumped bail and went into hiding in Wisconsin. He returned in 1972 to serve nine months in prison.
At the time of his appearance, the Young Lords, without his leadership, had mostly deteriorated, while the area around the Near North Side was rapidly deteriorating. However, he rallied Latinos in the area in a 1974 campaign for alderman, to serve on the Chicago City Council. He lost the race but received 40 percent of the vote.
Along with his sister Daisy, he is survived by two other sisters, Jenny and Mirna Jiménez; his children Jacqueline, Sonia, Melisa and Alejandro Jiménez and Jodette Lozano; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Mr. Jiménez later moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he worked as a substance abuse counselor. Received a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Grand Valley State University, outside Grand Rapids, in 2013; an associate degree in business administration from Grand Rapids Community College in 2017; and a master’s degree in public administration at Central Michigan University in 2020.
He also spent a lot of time preserving the history of the Young Lords. Mr. Jiménez helped establish archives and oral history projects dedicated to the group at Grand Valley State and DePaul University, in Chicago.
And he spoke often about his group and its legacy, insisting that while his life may have been short, his impact is still being felt.
“We call it the 40-year struggle,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2008. “We want people to know that the struggle is still going on.”
